SocialWorld is a customer of Tekriti Software. Tekriti Software is involved in building out the organization and community management framework for Acteva.com

SocialWorld was originally, already using the Amazon Web Services in a big manner, primarily the EC2 and S3 products of the AWS suite. However one area where they felt they needed greater performance was sharing and streaming of pictures. The site features several student groups of various schools and images are a very popular format using which people share their experiences.

Due to the huge sizes of the images, the uncropped version of the images was taking a lot of time to render on the machines. A better experience needed to be provided to load the images faster. The team at Tekriti Software immediately realized that they needed to get the content distribution network  CloudFront into play. The nature of the socialworld meta-networks made it ideal for using CloudFront, since the schools socialworld were catering due were spread across the United States. Hence using the edge locations for content delivery was an ideal choice to provide a better experience for image streaming.

Tekriti analyzed the scope of work involved in the migration of the existing set of images and in a matter of a couple of days, wrote scripts to migrate data from all of the instances of socialworld to S3 for subsequent serving of the edge locations of CloudFront. The code modules built for this migration, used the S3 API's to create buckets if none existed for that particular school instance and migrated all the image objects to S3. Post that it created analogous links of these images to map to the CloudFront resource identifier.

"The migration of images to CloudFront was extremely easy and a big win for us. Our users had started to complain on the long load times of the images, and in this day and age we simply had to provide higher performance, so that they wouldn't get frustrated and go elsewhere", says Bill Briner, Vice President  Products, Acteva Inc.

"We are now looking at CloudFront and other Amazon Infrastructure Services, for our other product offerings, since we are now confident we will get a much improved user experience along with greater scalability and cost savings", adds Bill Briner.